As this year’s international sex and technology conference Arse Elektronika 2008 hit its stride last Saturday — that’s Folsom Street Fair eve here in San Francisco – I found myself on a panel discussing “The Erotic of the Machine” (listen to the MP3 here) with six men and a sizable audience. The men were an assembly of artists from the Bay Area and Seattle to Austria and France, along with a sex machine maker, a sex machine pornographer and a spokesperson from San Francisco’s Kink.com, where the most famous sex machine site hails from. (That’s F-ing Machines.com*, also here in San Francisco.)

They went off on an existential tangent as we discussed sex with machines, ideas for “softer” interfaces, theories about the industrial revolution, gender and sexuality. I sat on my hands with a burning query until I couldn’t stand it anymore. Finally, I grabbed the microphone and asked Monochrom‘s Johannes Grenzfurthner if I could ask Kink.com’s Thomas Roche what I thought was the million-dollar question. And for Kink that million dollars is probably literal. I said, “Thomas. You work at Kink. The F-ing Machines site is insanely popular. Why!? Why do people want to watch women have sex with machines, and pay good money to do it? What’s the appeal?”

Thomas is of course used to this type of outburst from me onstage. His response was fantastic, including conjecture about the viewers projecting themselves into the scene, but he centered on the basic fact that it’s a woman alone, pleasuring herself, with no unnecessary window dressing tacked on. It’s true that a machine enables huge variations in how one conjures an orgasm, as in speed, stroke, size, vibration, steadiness, how long it all lasts — things that wouldn’t be possible with a human. Thomas told me, “There are many other advantages to sex with a human, and many things you will not get — yet — from a machine, like skin touch, smell, eye contact, tenderness, etc. Those things that humans alone can provide (so far) are only part of the sexual experience, but they are so fraught with intensity that they can often dominate the experience. …” (…read more!)

* Don’t you love seeing an address (URL) mangled!!?? I hope Peter already owns the URL they created for his site, with a redirect in place.

The London Times named Violet Blue "One of the 40 bloggers who really count" and Self Magazine named TinyNibbles one of the “Best Sex Resources for Women.” Blue is an autodidact and pundit on sex and technology, hacking and security, porn for women, privacy and bleeding-edge tech culture. She is a journalist for ZDNet, CBS News, CNET; she's an educator, speaker, crisis counselor, volunteer NGO trainer, and the author and editor of over 40 award-winning books.

I have to agree with Ewan as far as why I enjoy Fucking Machines-style porn. The biggest turn-on in the world, as far as I’m concerned, is watching a woman have an orgasm. There’s just something about that moment when they are utterly, completely absorbed in their own sensations. Kind of a unique combination of vulnerability and strength in that, I guess – and in person, via video, or even just audio it never fails to push ALL of my buttons.

So a woman having sex with a machine is kind of distilled version of that. Her orgasm is the entire point of the exercise, unlike conventional porn where the ‘money shot’ is what it’s all about. There’s also a very authentic quality to the orgasms that I don’t think you get otherwise. What would be the reason, after all, behind ‘faking it’ for the benefit of a machine?

I’m definitely a fan of the genre, but I don’t see any homophobic angle to that. After all, I enjoy conventional guy/girl porn too – but the machine stuff definitely holds a unique appeal.

I can be counted in among the number that loves Fucking machines. I would actually agree with Thomas Roche on his take on it. To me there is nothing that I find more attractive or more of a turn on than seeing a woman orgasm. With machines there is nothing else to distract, I can give full attention to the what the woman is experiencing. I’ve yet to see any other site with machines come close to the quality that fuckingmachines.com produces. They also introduced me to Lorelei lee for that I’m forever grateful.

Then there is my engineering background which I just can’t help thinking about what I would do to build one or improve/change the original design already. But that’s just because I’m a geek :P

Ms. Violet Blue (@violetblue) is an investigative tech reporter at CNET, Zero Day, ZDNet, and CBS News, as well as an award-winning sex author and columnist, making her the foremost expert in the field of sex and technology. She travels to hacker conferences and hacker gatherings around the world to cover hacking, cybercrime and personal privacy violations in countries such as Malaysia, Germany, Morocco, China, the Dominican Republic, the United States, and Serbia. In 2012, Blue presented “Hackers as a High-Risk Population” bringing harm reduction to the featured stage for CCC’s 29c3 hacker conference in Hamburg. She is an Advisor to Without My Consent, a Member of the Internet Press Guild, a Member of the Center for Investigative Reporting, and is an Editor on the Board for Routledge's Porn Studies Journal.

Blue appears on CNN and The Oprah Winfrey Show and is regularly interviewed, quoted, and featured in a variety of publications that includes ABC News and the Wall Street Journal. She has authored and edited award-winning, best selling books in eight translations - one is excerpted on Oprah Winfrey's website - and has been a sex columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle. She has been at the center of many Internet scandals, including Google’s “nymwars” and Libya’s web domain censorship and seizures—Forbes calls her “omnipresent on the web” and named her a Forbes Web Celeb. She has given keynote talks at such conferences as ETech, LeWeb, and the Forbes Brand Leadership Conference, she received a standing ovation at Seattle’s Gnomedex, and has given two Tech Talks at Google.